Ten years ago Wikipedia was widely considered a doomed experiment - <AUTHOR> https://medium.com/@cdixon/it-s-hard-to-believe-today-but-10-years-ago-wikipedia-was-widely-considered-a-doomed-experiment-a7a0dfd27b8b#.9bk1kti56 <comment><USER2> "It's hard to believe today, but 10 years ago Wikipedia was widely considered a doomed experiment run by utopian radicals."

I have absolutely no recollection of this. Wikipedia has had some trouble, just like any other successful project, but has in my view been widely regarded as a pretty successful project that everyone wants to have around (unless you sold encyclopedias).

<comment><USER3> >"It's hard to believe today, but 10 years ago Wikipedia was widely considered a doomed experiment run by utopian radicals."

I can't believe nobody has responded to this with [citation needed] yet! ;)

OK seriously now, I kind of remember some rumbling about the challenges facing the project: crowd-sourcing a general purpose encyclopedia, generating enough money to keep things running without showing ads - who would write the content, the quality would be terrible, etc.

I'm not sure it was "widely" considered as doomed, but I'm also sure the breadth and depth of topics and overall result ranges from outright shock to pleasant surprise of the naysayers.

Wikipedia has flaws but overall it is a great reference on a massive variety of topics. Here's an anecdotal example: I'm a hiker and a friend and I ran across a weird looking fruit on the trail. After taking pics and asking around we were told it was an "Osage orange". Never heard of it, so I went to Wikipedia and found a lot of info and yes, that was definitely it. I can't imagine Encyclopedia Brittanica, World Book, any of those I remember from my youth, would have had as much info on the Osage orange!

<comment><USER4> A neat exercise for anyone who thinks Wikipedia isn't a useful reference is to pick ten random subjects from Encyclopedia Britannica and see how many of them have an article in Wikipedia. (Answer is most likely "all of them".) Then do the opposite:

Space Flight Operations Center (in wiki but not E.B.) Hypertrocta (in wiki but not E.B.) Sokół motorcycles (in wiki but not E.B.) Paradeudorix petersi (in wiki but not E.B.) Bella Voce (in wiki but not E.B.) ...and so on...

Now there is a certain amount of vandalism, rumor, political skew, etc. so you should take what you read in Wikipedia with a grain of salt, but at least it's there. Most of the time it will point you to a more authoritative source in case you think someone's being deceptive about Osage oranges.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Well, Wikipedia is pretty famous for its fairly vicious politics, infighting and general difficulty of getting incorrect articles fixed if someone has decided to camp on them. Whenever I read it I'm constantly amazed that it works as well as it does, given that whenever I peer behind the curtain what's going on there is fairly appalling.

I remember some years ago the wiki page for Bitcoin insisted it was a ponzi scheme. Wikipedia has a page that defines the essential elements of a ponzi scheme and Bitcoin didn't meet them, but no matter - edits to remove this statement were immediately reverted and diverted to an endless discussion page in which the camper in question couldn't be persuaded by any means, not logic, not evidence, not weight of people disagreeing. I see that these days the issue has been "resolved" by having an entire section called "ponzi scheme dispute" that consists merely of different pundits contradicting each other.

Still, this is better than it used to be.

<comment><USER6> > these days the issue has been "resolved" by having an entire section called > "ponzi scheme dispute" that consists merely of different pundits > contradicting each other.

IMHO that is a good thing more often that not. It means that someone who has heard the rumour will check Wikipedia and find a couple paragraphs about the subject, with links to the most trusted agreed-upon references about who said what.

The alternative is not having the section and requiring those same readers to search their own way through the internet, without having any idea of what sources to trust, and likely getting only one side of the controversy.

<comment><USER5> It's definitely a better situation than it was, insomuch as at least people can make up their mind about it.

That said, call me a pedant, but the term has a clear definition. The statement is either right or wrong. Being able to cite people who merely assert an opinion doesn't make them automatically worth having on an encyclopedia page.

As examples, the wiki page for Barack Obama doesn't mention the claim that he's a Muslim or that his birth certificate was faked anywhere .... because it's factually incorrect nonsense that shouldn't be on a wiki page. Ditto for the page on climate change.

But this sort of thing seems very hit or miss. Whether pages can be kept factual or not seems to depend just as much on whether someone reverts every change to the page, as the facts themselves.

<comment><USER7> Mostly it's about recentism. Wikipedia, as all encyclopedias, is usually very good for stuff that doesn't change frequently or in large amounts.

But there is a continuing problem with recent and current events. You get a lot of people trying to produce a single article, and disputes occur.

One example: the Amanda Knox article spent literally _years_ in a slow-moving and entrenched edit war (which nearly gave me a hernia trying to unpick) over whether she was guilty or not - all of which was up in the air due to pending court cases.

As soon as the case died down and tied up, the article instantly became a dead zone and is mostly OK.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> When the SOPA/PIPA protests happened in 2012, I was really surprised to learn that students were upset since all they used as a resource was Wikipedia.

I mean for the most part I agree with the quoted articles in that Wikipedia is hard to "verify" other than what you believe sounds true. And sometimes this happens.

1) Someone write something on Wikipedia 2) Person changes it 3) Another person reverts, citing source X. Source X is "Celebrity Magazine" which may or may not have actually checked that fact on Wikipedia. 5) Repeat

It is a bit scary how much our source of information is just this one site source without decent "fact" checking other than turf war related reasons.

Here is one: I am pretty certain that Alicia Keys was born in 1980 and not 1981 as her Wikipedia article says. I have no way to prove this based on Wikipedia standards and if you look on "the Internet" you sometimes see 1980 and sometimes see 1981. The editors who turfed her page at the time sided with the 1981 timeline.

And how did they "prove" it was 1981? They showed links to some music related websites with articles about her saying she was born in that year. Completely ignoring alternative sources that said she was born in 1981.

I mean there are certain explanations on why this happened: 1) A major publication cited her DOB as 1981, others followed suit. 2) Alicia keys' handlers want her to be a year younger than she is, so she told her PR people to make sure everyone says she was born a year younger. 3) Someone misheard she was born in 1981, wrote that down on Wikipedia, then everyone else just used Wikipedia as a reference.

The problem I'm trying to get at is, Wikipedia is so popular its hard to figure out if people are just lazy and using it as a source, which perpetuates this cycle of "Fact F on Article A is true because of source S, Source S it turns out, used article A to look up Fact F and reprinted it without really fact checking F.

So yeah, popular, but hard to determine how accurate. /rant.

<comment><USER9> > 1) Someone write something on Wikipedia 2) Person changes it 3) Another > person reverts, citing source X. Source X is "Celebrity Magazine" which may > or may not have actually checked that fact on Wikipedia. 5) Repeat

As illustrated in this useful infographic: [https://xkcd.com/978/](https://xkcd.com/978/)

<comment><USER10> There's a short list here: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_citogenesis_incidents)

See also: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reporting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_reporting)

</comment></comment></comment><comment> vezzy-fnord My recollections from Wikipedia back in 2005 were quite impressive given the massive scale and open contribution barriers of the project.

In fact, the reception is just as split today as it was back then. Especially in light of increased grievances regarding how Wikipedia's bureaucracy operates.

<comment><USER11> Indeed. There's studies in how to bias an article whilst maintaining the illusion of NPOV (simple example: if you support X, always add an adjective when describing its detractors, but leave supporters unqualified). There's also pretty well documented cases of people with an axe to grind on specific subjects locking an article in their favour.

<comment><USER12> Do you by any chance have links to those studies? I'm building a crowdsourced platform, so that info could be super-valuable to me.

<comment> vezzy-fnord It seems like a case of the fallacy generally known as "poisoning the well". You can start there.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> Wikipedia is what convinced everyone that you could "crowd-source" everything. That inevitably spawned all sorts of doomed experiments. But the only ones who considered _Wikipedia_ a "doomed experiment" were those who had a vested interest in that being true.

<comment><USER14> What are some of the other success stories of the crowd-source movement besides Wikipedia? StackOverflow / StackExchange comes mind perhaps.

<comment><USER15> Open Street Maps, IMDb. Heck, Reddit and HN. This is how the net works: we build it together.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> > There are occasional errors and controversies, but for the most part it > provides accurate, comprehensive information to billions of people every > day.

Comprehensive? What?

<comment><USER17> Billions? What?

<comment><USER16> That's... a very good point.

<comment><USER18> Some random Internet stat says there are about 3 billion users on the Internet. It's reasonable to assume that Wikipedia gets used by at 1-2 billion at minimum.

<comment><USER16> Daily?

<comment><USER18> Right. Reading comprehension failure on my part, sorry :<.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> 10 years ago I was optimistic about Wikipedia.

For me Wikipedia and Stackoverflow are now only reference material; - I rarely even consider contributing. I still pay a bit once in a while for the fundraisers but my feeling is that will decrease as well.

</comment><comment><USER20> Personal anecdote: I was in a location where Jimmy Wales introduced himself in 2007 with a simple, "My name is Jimmy Wales, I started Wikipedia". Some 50 very senior people from many industries and professions all said "thank you!" enthusiastically in response.

It wasn't considered a failure or doomed in any circle I frequented 10 years ago, and I did a lot (academia, business, entrepreneurship, makers, more) -- and it wasn't so with anyone of the "general population" that I associated with. The only less-than-positive remarks I've heard about Wikipedia where from people who snarked "but anyone anywhere can change a value any time, how can you ever trust that?" Which is, of course, true -- but a variation of which applies to e.g. Encyclopedia Britannica just as well.

</comment><comment><USER21> This article is essentially an approximation of a Jay-Z song, celebrating the triumph over adversity and haters. If Wikipedia started out selling crack the similarities would be overwhelming.

Good on ya, Wikipedia! You've come a long way up.

</comment><comment><USER22> Just like almost everything else that ends up getting big and successful.

<comment><USER23> Not really - Wikipedia still makes you say, "That can't possibly work." Think about it - the first and most definitive, accessible source on any subject you don't know anything about, is something strangers on the Internet can collaboratively edit, troll, or subtlely subvert. This just can't work - except that it does!

It goes counter to everything on the Internet. You would expect it to read like the comments section of a news article - instead, it's more definitive and factual than news articles themselves. Amazing!

<comment><USER24> > Think about it - the first and most definitive, accessible source on any > subject you don't know anything about, is something strangers on the > Internet can collaboratively edit, troll, or subtlely subvert.

That's not true. Go to this page

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_celebrities](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_celebrities)

pick a list and add yourself into it. Within an hour your change will have been reverted.

This claim that anybody can edit wikipedia is bullshit and rather annoying.

<comment><USER25> You've pointed out one page that has good monitoring. There are plenty of pages that don't have anybody watching them where changes can be made.

<comment><USER26> Still the point is valid - the wildcard "anybody can edit" is not at all true, for many of the most 'followed' pages. Which are the one that are most interesting to change.

I've had old company listings disappear because they had no links. The company is gone! History! Nothing to link to. So that meant some busybody made it their job to delete that piece.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER27> Today it's just widely considered a very popular but doomed experiment. Wikipedia is corrupt as hell and the power of editing important pages lies in the hands of a few elites.

<comment><USER28> > corrupt as hell and the power of editing important pages lies in the hands > of a few elites.

Are other medias better in that respect?

</comment></comment><comment><USER29> The talk was that it was doomed, but from inside it was blindingly obvious that, "if we want a good encyclopedia in ten years, it's going to have to be a good Wikipedia." I said so at the time: [http://reddragdiva.dreamwidth.org/277688.html](http://reddragdiva.dreamwidth.org/277688.html)

</comment><comment><USER30> It would seem there's a conflict of interest between Wikipedia and those that report on it, since there's some overlap there. Reminds me of the old Upton Sinclair quote: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."

</comment><comment><USER31> Upper management sent out an email my workforce telling us "to beware the Wikis". Their stance was that since anyone can edit it, it can not be trusted and that it could potentially host malicious content.

</comment><comment><USER32> The current example of similar style "claim chowder" is probably Bob Lutz' commentary on Tesla. And I would do the same thing I did back then re: Wikipedia: acknowledge but discount.

</comment><comment><USER33> Wikipedia has succeeded in allowing the victors to write history. Nothing damaging to the status quo escapes the paid Hasbara editors.

</comment><comment><USER34> Long-long time ago, there was Microsoft Encarta

</comment><comment><USER35> I wonder how successful Wikipedia would have been if it weren't for being the first result in almost every Google query.

<comment><USER36> Isn't it an indicator of success that it is the first result in almost every Google query? The articles don't write themselves and Google tries to show the most relevant information, hence the articles must have some standing before they percolate up the results.

<comment><USER37> It's not as simple as that. Does Google show the most relevant information, or does it show a non-profit link that suppresses its competitors, and that it can scrape without any legal issues? Does it promote Wikipedia to give its search results authority, even when other sites may have better and more accurate information? I explore some of these issues here: [http://newslines.org/blog/google-and-wikipedia-best- friends-...](http://newslines.org/blog/google-and-wikipedia-best-friends- forever/)

<comment><USER38> I imagine their ranking metrics show that Wikipedia pages are very popular with their users, which is why they've steadily moved up in the rankings. It makes sense too - Wikipedia gives a general rundown of a topic in a standard format, so for a initial search to learn the basics of something it's a great destination. Can't see much of a conspiracy here.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> To be fair, pretty much everything on the Internet in 2005 was a doomed experiment. Plenty of them have beat the odds.

</comment><comment><USER40> I never had the impression this was true 10 years ago. Source: I was there

</comment><comment><USER41> Clickbait title is clickbait. And wrong.</comment>


How I invented Facebook. And completely failed to exploit it. - <AUTHOR> http://supersteil.com/blog/352/how-i-invented-facebook-and-completely-failed-to-exploit-it/

<comment><AUTHOR> Lessons learned from this (a little bit sad) story: never give up your ideas, look beyond them, and persist in pursuing them.</comment>


Icelandic airline Wow Air collapses and cancels all flights - <AUTHOR> https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/28/icelandic-airline-wow-air-collapses-and-cancels-all-flights.html <comment><USER2> Just a reminder: when you buy something from a company that they don't deliver immediately, you're one of its creditors. If they declare bankruptcy, unless you're in the 90-day credit card chargeback window (or have some other protection), you get in line with the other creditors. This goes for gift cards, too.

In general, be careful buying things more than 90 days out because of this, and be careful when you effectively "lend" money to a struggling company.

<comment><USER3> "You can't get blood from a stone".

Even if you are one of the creditors. If the company is bankrupt the biggest creditors usually get paid first. In the case of Wow Air, that's most likely the companies that leased them the planes. Many creditors have to be statisfied before it's your turn as an invidiual.

Legally, you are indeed a creditor and you deserve to be paid back if possible. In reality, that rarely happens.

<comment><USER4> Having different classes of creditor ranked seems like almost fraud to me.

A bank who has a higher priority with bankruptcy proceedings has a strong incentive to keep loaning out cash to the failing business at ever worse rates until _just_ the moment that the assets no longer cover their outlay. At that point, they make the company bankrupt with the full knowledge all the other creditors will get nothing and they'll get their full capital back.

<comment><USER5> You make a interesting point. I wonder if we've actually seen this in practice anywhere. Perhaps to avoid this, you receive a portion of the amount paid back to creditors equal to your percentage of debt owed?

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Must have been pretty dramatic if they suddenly canceled all flights rather than winding down the company. The article doesn't exactly make that clear.

<comment><USER7> It was not abrupt. Things had been bad for them for the last year or so. WOW worked (publicly) for the past five months to find a new source of funding and restructure its operations, hoping to continue flights.

* In November 2018 it looked like Icelandair would acquire WOW Air, though that deal ended up falling through

* After that, Indigo Partners (private equity group which has invested in quite a few airlines) signed an agreement in principle to invest in WOW Air; just a few days ago it was announced that this deal fell through

* Earlier this month, WOW Air announced that they were back in discussions with Icelandair, and that the parties hoped to conclude negotiations by Monday, March 25, 2019

* On Sunday Icelandair announced that they had concluded talks with WOW Air, and didn't intend to move forward

* Then things got really bad, as one of their planes was allegedly repossessed in Montreal

WOW Air bondholders approved a plan to convert their bonds into equity, but that only takes you so far

On a related note, WOW Air is the third European airline to halt operations this year, joining Flybmi and Germania.

<comment><USER8> Just as a note, Indigo Partners is an American private equity firm which has controlling stakes in Frontier Airlines and Chilean low cost carrier JetSmart and stakes in Wizz Air and Volaris, which are major low cost carriers in Eastern Europe and Mexico respectively.

The Indian low cost carrier Indigo is unrelated.

<comment><USER7> Thanks for letting me know. I've updated my post to remove that reference.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> good riddance. flied with them once. the seat was worse than those outdoors metal folding and stackable seats you see in very cheap beach front places. no padding. absolutely no reclining.

it was a criminal lack of basic ergonomics for the tens of hours you seat on them.

<comment><USER10> It would have been nice if they had shut down more gracefully, though, since there's currently hundreds (if not thousands) of people stranded across the globe…

<comment><USER4> A graceful shutdown can be considered fraudulent.

By doing a graceful shutdown, they will take much bigger losses in the last few weeks of trading, which is the directors not fulfilling their duty to shareholders.

<comment><USER10> Is not stranding people and not shutting down with zero notice fraudulent?</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Plastic bags are good for you - <AUTHOR> http://reason.com/archives/2015/09/01/plastic-bags-are-good-for-you

<comment><USER2> Although I am partial to this argument, I did not walk away from this article thinking that plastic bags are good. However, it did make a case for why they are "less bad" than most people think.

Key points:

\- Plastic bags a technologically marvelous and poor people can use them to carry many groceries

\- Plastic bags make up only 0.6% of visible litter, and plastic grocery bags are but a subset of that -- other studies with higher numbers have unreliable methodologies.

\- As David Santillo, a senior biologist with Greenpeace, told The Times of London, "It's very unlikely that many animals are killed by plastic bags. The evidence shows just the opposite. We are not going to solve the problem of waste by focusing on plastic bags. With larger mammals it's fishing gear that's the big problem. On a global basis plastic bags aren't an issue."

\- Most plastic bags are made with natural gas, and not oil (and even if it were oil, 100 billion bags would be less oil than American consumes in one day)

\- Ultimately, the amount (in tons) of reusable bags thrown in landfills every year is greater than that of plastic bags.

\- Reusable bags can be unsanitary and have led to an outbreak of norovirus (and I assume other incidents as well, although no other figures were provided)

I do think this is sufficient evidence to oppose bans on plastic bags (although -- as I said before -- I am biased). In order to make something illegal, a very strong case should be made against it. Banning plastic bags would have virtually no effect on liter, global warming, landfills, or animals life. That being said, I wish there were more of a comparison with paper bags, so we could determine which one is truly the best.

<comment><USER3> The takeaway is that there is no magic solution. Consumption implies impact, whether you use paper or plastic. Unless you shop at a farm, there's still a bunch of packaging in your grocery haul outside of the carrying bag - the box containing the froot loops, the bag containing the organic beet chips, the foam plate and plastic wrap that contains your free-range chicken. Therefore be thoughtful about what you consume.

tl/dr: Re-use your paper bags. Ride your bike to the grocery.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Why is it that environmental conservation is anathema to the right wing? _Laisser faire_ , social conservatism, individual freedom, these are concepts that traditionally go with the Right, but the environment is orthogonal to all these.

<comment><USER5> Obviously Reason is a libertarian publication, but the article argues that plastic bags are not bad for the environment, considering the alternatives.

The overall opposition by libertarian/conservative groups is that conservation policies require centralized control and action. You can both accept the possibility of global catastrophe based on environmental damages, but you also fear the centralized control that is required to even try and manage the potential crises. Also, many are skeptical of the political process as an effective means to solve big problems.</comment></comment>


Looking for interesting startup APIs for mobile client development - <AUTHOR>

Do you know any startup with smaller userbase and public API which I could use to create mobile client, get experience while building it, publish it for free and have something to put in my resume?<p>Thanks <comment><USER2> Hey digital,

If you are interested, we could give you some API URLs to work with our JSON API at SpeakBin.com - we're an audio recording platform that integrates with Facebook and Twitter. We could use an iPhone app - if you're interested in getting on board drop an e-mail to firstname.lastname@example.com - I'll get back to you ASAP.</comment>